3 Tips for Achieving Alignment Between Marketing and Sales in the Field

Field marketers are significant assets to their organization (and I’m not just saying that because I am one!) Field marketing teams organize activities like tradeshows and networking events to drive brand awareness, attract prospects, and ultimately, help field sales teams cultivate pipeline. They get your company’s message outside the office walls and directly where it matters: in front of potential customers and industry heavy-weights.

As a field team member, I can say that it’s crucial to keep sales teams on the same page so that they understand what’s in the pipeline and which activities are contributing. So it’s not only important that the teams understand their own roles, but they need to know how to work together, too. With that being said, here are three best practices I swear by to ensure just that:

1. Meet regularly with field team members

It may sound fairly routine, but holding regularly recurring meetings with field teams can go a long way towards keeping everyone on the same page. Here at Marketo, field team members are mapped directly to regional and industry-focused teams and meet with them at a regular cadence, typically weekly. The purpose is twofold:

To partner with them in an effort to brainstorm the best marketing tactics to implement to help them close more deals

To keep them posted on upcoming events that they’re participating in

The key here is to err on the side of over-communication. Field teams stay busy, and keeping them up-to-speed through multiple channels (regular emails and weekly calls, for example) will assure that they stay informed and in sync, too.

2. Arm team members with real-time account activity to help them prospect

In addition to keeping field team members in-the-know about campaigns mapped to their territory, we also keep them armed with information to help streamline their outbound calling efforts. Through Marketo’s Real-Time Personalization tool, we’re able to capture anonymous account activity on our website. We do a weekly data send of this activity to field teams, specific either to their region or industry focus and pair it with any known activity occurring within the same territory (known, for example, through engagement with one of our campaigns), so that they can cross-reference and get a broader picture of account activity. Doing this offers substantial returns! It’s a fairly light lift to prepare the data, but it can go a long way towards helping teams prioritize their outbound efforts.

3. Communicate real-time information about campaign activity

Giving field reps real-time information on how key players on their accounts are engaging with campaigns is incredibly helpful information as well. Through our instance of Marketo, we’re able to track how prospects interact with our campaigns, but we’re also able to push this information in real-time to our CRM, via Marketo Sales Insight, for teams to view and take action on (by phone or email, for example), in order to close more deals. This is an efficient and powerful way to share information that once again enables field teams to prospect quickly and nimbly.

My advice here is simply to try implementing these tactics. They’ll go a long way towards improving alignment with your marketing and sales field teams so that everyone feels well-informed on all activities. Just remember—a stronger team will result in stronger events and stronger pipeline! Do you have any tips to add? I’d love to read them. Please share them in the comments section below.

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